AIA Wisconsin is pleased to present the four honor- and three merit-award winners—plus one project receiving special recognition—all named at the chapter’s 73rd convention, April 21, at Monona Terrace in Madison. Jurors James Dayton, AIA, James Dayton Design, Minneapolis; Margaret Helfand, FAIA, Helfand Architecture, New York City; and James von Klemperer, AIA, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, New York City reviewed 64 submissions to make their choices.

Honor Awards

Sutter Residence, Bichwil, Switzerland, by Fuerer Gastrau Architektur, for Marco and Michaela Sutter
The architects strove to create a high-functioning, warm, and inviting residence for a family of four based on a simple set of Modern elements that “produce a unique-looking object with a soul.” The compact house employs both sustainable building techniques and low-maintenance materials. With the Alps as a backdrop, the design incorporates a flow of architectonic elements, sliding panels, color, and storage units placed as furniture to provide privacy. The exterior combines black slate with aluminum windows and panels.
Jury Comments: “This project jumped off the pages for its concise use of square planning and austere use of materials. It has a surprising sensibility—very thorough and very well organized. There is a certain poetry in that kind of restraint.”
Photo © Catweazle Photography

RS+K Strategic/Creative, Madison, by KEE Architecture, Inc., for RS+K Strategic/Creative
Designed under a tight time schedule and strict budgetary constraints, this new 30,000-square-foot office building offers inviting light-filled spaces appropriate for the owner’s creative business, a communications design firm. It also provides rental space with underground parking. The innovative design features two floors of highly flexible loft space with continuous clerestory windows, sloped interior ceilings, and an abundance of natural light. Employing tilt-up construction, the design expresses the qualities of repetition, mass, texture, and planarity inherent in this technique.
Jury Comments: “In terms of the way the materials are handled and how the spaces are organized, this project rises to a whole other level. It has very elegant details and is an original arrangement for an office building. The building is very well conceived.”
Photo © Douglas Kozel

Rennebohm Hall, UW-Madison School of Pharmacy, Madison, by Perkins & Will, with Potter Lawson Inc., for the State of Wisconsin, Division of State Facilities
The design of this 214,000-square-foot university education and basic research facility offers a successful synthesis of three major elements: a two-story base containing student activity spaces, research laboratory tower, and library. The building’s exterior dramatizes its internal functions. For example, a grid of punched openings in solid masonry reflects the modular nature of the enclosed laboratories. The architect reports that Rennebohm Hall symbolically demonstrates the increasing importance of the pharmacy profession to interdisciplinary health-care research, teaching, and practice.
Jury Comments: “The building program is very well translated into the material, palette, expression, scale, language, and exterior of the building. This results in beautiful amalgams of massing forms, which seem entirely appropriate to this half-campus, half-scientific research building.”
Photo © Bob Freund

The Milwaukee Rowing Club at Kilbourn Landing, Milwaukee, by Vetter Denk Architects Inc., for Redevelopment Authority, City of Milwaukee
This boathouse project along the Milwaukee River, designed as a virtual “non-building,” is actually a landscape insertion that creates space for simple functions by retaining the surrounding soil. The design solution consists of a roof, tower, curtain wall, and plaza. Sloping towards the river, the building’s green roof becomes an extension of Kilbourn Park bluff, serving as a public park that overlooks the river. The 24-foot-tall tower provides storage for the rowing oars, defines the site entrance, and acts as an illuminated beacon at night. A polycarbonate curtain wall faces the river and extends the entire length of the building, glowing softly at dusk. The plaza provides a staging area for launching the sculls and doubles as a public gathering space with access to the river. The boathouse is graceful civic architecture, connecting the RiverWalk with the Beerline neighborhood.
Jury Comments: “This is an easy project to fall in love with because of its clarity in both concept and presentation. It has an interesting combination of architectural elements and sustainability features. The structure itself sings with poetic fervor. Its simple gestures create a very open relationship with the water and the city. This project is very elegant.”
Photo © Brian Filkins and Hsiao-Tsui Lu

Merit Awards

ACT Headquarters Building Project, Iowa City, Iowa, by Flad & Associates, for ACT
This new headquarters of the nation’s largest developer and administrator of educational and career assessments sits on the site of its original 1959 facility. The new headquarters facility creates a sense of community that fosters collaboration among groups, departments, and individuals. To do so, the architect created a cloister of buildings connected by interior and exterior common spaces and pedestrian paths. The complex includes a 120,000-square-foot office facility and a 50,000-square-foot commons building, which contains the library, meeting and training rooms, and cafeteria. A courtyard integrates exterior spaces with interior program functions.
Jury Comments: “So many projects talk about creating a sense of place; this one actually does. As a collective, it is successful as an urban gesture in a rural setting. There is an absolutely clear-shot view through most of these buildings, preserving a very healthy exposure to daylight. This makes sense in a building that is about careers, work, and finding where people are going to be spending their time in the future. In short, it looks like a nice place to work.”
Photo © Steve Hall/Hedrich Blessing

Parts House Roof Pavilion, Milwaukee, by Johnsen Schmaling Architects, for Joe and Cindy Rewolinski
This project exemplifies Milwaukee’s newfound urban vitality. What was once a blacktop roof above a loft in a renovated 1920s warehouse is now an open-air pavilion defined by a curtain of multicolored transparent and translucent plastic panels. Supported by a prefabricated steel trellis, the panels can be arranged to provide various levels of privacy, offer shelter, and act as a picture frame and color filter for different views of the city and its skyline. At night, a lighting system transforms the panels into a fantasy of colors and shadows visible from the interstate below. The design solution is a creative response to the owner’s desire for a “multipurpose outdoor living room.”
Jury Comments: “We were entertained and inspired by this project. Its ‘magic lantern’ qualities are intriguing because a blank brick façade is turned into a projection screen. This is very ingenious. Hopefully, this project will inspire others to think creatively about how they can create accommodations in these underutilized industrial structures.”
Photo © Brian Johnsen

UW Health Clinic, by The Renschler Company Inc., Portage, Wis., for Tim Neitzel
This new outpatient clinic, which includes internal medicine, family medicine, and rheumatology practices, uses a nontraditional approach for the structure and skin that result in “an attractive health-care facility with an attitude.” The building employs a “steel systems-constructed structure,” incorporating steel frames and purlins. Complementing a split-faced masonry skin, a concealed-fastener, metal-panel system creates a durable skin. The resulting savings in structural costs made it possible to budget an increased interior volume, upgraded glazing and feature finishes, and higher eaves and clerestory windows for natural light in the central workspaces. The clinic layout allows for future expansion of exam rooms, nursing stations, and outpatient services.
Jury Comments: “This project has a seemingly innocent and humble quality to its exterior materials. There is a very rich coming together in the central waiting area. The strategy of using industrial building systems for this kind of application also is intriguing and rather unexpected.”
Photo © Del Brown

Special Recognition

For special recognition for urban revitalization, the jury selected:

ASQ Center, Milwaukee, by Kahler Slater, for Williams Development and Irgens Development Partners LLC
The resurrected ASQ Center is considered one of Milwaukee’s architectural gems and a main catalyst for the continued resurgence of the downtown area. The main design challenge was to reconcile the history of the building, the former Marshall Field’s department store, to fit the contemporary needs of current and future tenants. Although a few remnants of the old building—columns, ceiling details, a terrazzo staircase—remain, the interior largely had to be gutted. The exterior work had to meet strict federal guidelines to be eligible for historic preservation tax credits. The resulting mixed-use facility includes Class-A office space, a 131-room hotel, retail space on the first floor, and underground parking.
Jury Comments: “This project is recognized to acknowledge the efforts of the developer and architect to bring life back to this part of the city by selective demolition, redevelopment, and adaptive reuse of an important downtown building. Urban revitalization is a challenge in all of our cities, and this project is a model for future redevelopment in the downtown area.”
Photo courtesy of the architect

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